Billboard company taps cellphone data to learn about who sees its ads

A billboard on North Avenue and Pulaski Road in Chicago displays artwork as part of an art project in 2014. In Chicago and 10 other markets, outdoor advertising company Clear Channel Outdoor Americas is working with companies that use mobile phone location data to learn more about who is passing its billboards. (Michael Tercha / Chicago Tribune)

Targeted ads already follow you on Facebook and Twitter. Now they're coming to the billboards on your commute.

Outdoor advertising company Clear Channel Outdoor Americas is working with companies that use mobile phone location data to learn more about who is passing its billboards and whether they later visit advertisers' stores, said Andy Stevens, Clear Channel's senior vice president of research and insights.

Advertisement

"One weakness with billboards in the past is there's been a lack of intelligence about who the campaigns are reaching. This gives a level of granularity advertisers are used to in other forms of technology," Stevens said.

A portion of the service, called Clear Channel Outdoor Radar, is currently only available in the company's 11 largest markets, including Chicago, where it has 4,000 displays across seven counties. Clear Channel said it plans to expand the service later this year.

Advertisement

In the past, billboard companies relied on traffic data to give advertisers an idea of how many cars passed a sign, as well as broad demographic information based on where the drivers likely lived, Stevens said.

Clear Channel's Radar service can't follow individual drivers, Stevens said. But it could tell companies that want to advertise to soccer moms, NFL fans or gym users which billboards see a higher share of traffic from the kind of customers they want to reach, or whether people who saw a billboard were more likely to later visit one of the advertisers' stores, he said.

The billboards themselves don't track customers. Clear Channel matches up aggregated location data from partner companies with a map of its billboards to learn more about the people driving by. Clear Channel said its initial partners are AT&T Data Patterns, Place IQ (which uses location data to collect information about consumer behavior) and Placed (which rewards users who let its app constantly track their location, linking ads seen to stores visited, and take surveys).

The service is currently used for all Clear Channel roadside billboards in Chicago with digital or vinyl ads, Stevens said, including those along Interstates 90/94, 290 and 55.

Advertisement

One of the first companies to use the service was Toms Shoes. Radar found its billboards raised awareness of the shoe company's social mission and increased store visits and purchases, according to Clear Channel.

Even when an app gives users the ability to opt out of having their location or other data tracked, people often don't know how their data will be used, she said.

"Without that full picture, they don't know what it was they were agreeing to," she said.

If data really are anonymous and analyzed only in aggregate, Gartland said, consumers don't have much to worry about. But assessing whether customers act on the ads they see implies at least one of the companies involved has access to individual-level data, even if it isn't Clear Channel, she said.

"The fact that they're sharing it with the billboard company in one way doesn't mean they aren't repurposing it in other ways," she said.

In a statement, Clear Channel and the data providers it partnered with said they abide by regulations protecting consumers' privacy and keep data anonymous and aggregated.

Stevens said there's nothing new about what Radar does except the billboards. The data Clear Channel works with have already been used to target different types of advertisements for years, and concerned customers always can opt out, he said.